Coveo infographic illustrates history of knowledge sharing

We've come to think of knowledge sharing in the context of enterprise social software, but long before Andrew McAfee ever coined the term Enterprise 2.0, we have been sharing knowledge in a myriad of ways, from primitive cave drawings to printed books, to computers and more sophisticated technology.

This infographic from Coveo follows this history of knowledge sharing through the ages and gives you a good sense of the evolutionary track it has taken. An interesting fact here is that the hyperlink was invented in 1965, which seems very early given that we didn't really take advantage of it for 25 years, but AOL started as a company in 1985 long before most of us were accessing the Internet and 5 years before Tim Berners-Lee published the first the World Wide Web specification.

Speaking of which, two glaring omissions here are the pivotal historical moment when Berners-Lee published the first web spec, which changed knowledge sharing forever, and when Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) launched its search engine, which changed how we access and share knowledge on the web.